TR and John Muir - Two Visionaries Who Saved America's Treasures

I wrote this for mcmanweb back in 2002. Enjoy ...

"We do not intend our natural resources to be exploited by the few against the interests of the many."

Believe it or not, a Republican President said that, Theodore Roosevelt. TR was not your average President. According to Kay Jamison, who needs no introduction, speaking to the 2002 Depression and Related Affective Disorders (DRADA) Conference, Teddy Roosevelt was "hypomanic on a mild day." He suffered from depression, and mental illness ran in the family, including a brother who had to be institutionalized and a son who committed suicide. He wrote 40 books, and read a book a day, even as President.

The context of Dr Jamison’s talk was exuberance, which was the title of her next book in progress (since published in 2004). We have "given sorrow many words," says Dr Jamison, "but passion for life few." Exuberance, she says, "takes us many places," with "delight its own reward, adventure its own pleasure." But exuberance and joy are also fragile, "bubbles burst, cartwheels abort," all part of the yin and yang of emotion, as "joy with no counterweight has no weight at all."

TR came into the world in 1858 "a full-blown exuberant." According to a Harvard classmate, "he zoomed, he boomed, he bolted wildly." A journalist said that after you went home from a meeting with the President you had to "wring the personality out of your clothes."

In 1903, TR teamed up with fellow exuberant, John Muir, for an extended hiking trip in Yosemite. Nature was Muir’s deliverance from his strict Scottish immigrant upbringing. Someone described his writings as the "journal of a soul on fire." He literally spoke in tongues to wildflowers, and his constant stream of letters to lawmakers ultimately attracted the attention of the twenty-sixth President of the US.

"Any fool could destroy trees," Muir wrote. "They can’t run away." Muir saw God’s immanence everywhere in nature, particularly in the mighty sequoias. "Unfortunately, "God cannot save trees from fools," he observed. "Only the government can do that."

TR was a committed conservationist long before he met John Muir, but after the Yosemite trip he marshaled his exuberance with new urgency. When TR assumed office in 1901, half of the nation’s timberlands had been cut down, the buffalo and other species faced extinction, and special interests were teaming up to lay waste to huge tracts of pristine wilderness. Thanks to TR, five national parks were created, along with 150 national forests, 51 bird refuges, four national game preserves, 18 national monuments (including the Grand Canyon which later became a national park), 24 reclamation projects, and the National Forest Service. Significantly, TR extended the concept of democracy to include future citizens, arguing that it was undemocratic to exploit the nation’s resources for present profit. "The greatest good for the greatest number," he wrote, "applies to the number within the womb of time."

In 1912, a would-be assassin shot TR in the chest. Faced with the prospect of premature death, he remarked, "No man has had a happier life than I have led; a happier life in every way." The deaths of his first wife and mother on the same day followed by a grieving period that lasted two years seemingly belies that statement, but personal realization has long been recognized as the reconciliation of opposites, and the same applies to John Muir, as well, who wrote he only went out for a walk but stayed out till sunset, for "going out was coming in."

Guest Blog - Cristina Romero Reports on Kay Jamison

Kay Jamison PhD is without equal in articulating the points of view of both an expert and a patient, with the co-authorship of the definitive text on bipolar and the leading bipolar memoir to her credit. But what makes Dr Jamison truly worth listening to is the simple fact that she is leading a successful life.

My friend Cristina Romero was present last year when Dr Jamison addressed a DBSA group on the east coast. Over to you, Cristina ...

Thank you, John.

Dr. Jamison spoke about many thought-provoking subjects as they relate to mental illness, one of which I’d like to share with you here. The subject here is getting treatment to develop a stable ecosystem within a brain that suffers from mental illness.

Dr. Jamison read from her classic memoir, "An Unquiet Mind," in which she recalls her pre-lithium highs:

"The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent, like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes. The right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty."

But when the mania turns into manic psychosis, she wrote:

"The fast ideas are far too fast and there are far too many. Overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against. You are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of your mind. You never knew those caves were there."

“I don’t know that anybody really knows how the brain mutates and changes over the years," Dr. Jamison acknowledged in response to a question from her audience.

"I would say at the most simplistic level is that if you took a scan of your brain on one manic episode, you would prefer to have that brain than the brain on five or six or seven manic episodes."

The cumulative effect on the brain of repeated manias, she said, is "one of the most compelling arguments for staying on your medications and being aggressively treated."

"You can’t keep having heart attacks," she emphasized. "You can’t keep having strokes. You can’t keep having depression and you can’t keep having manias, without paying a biologic cost.”

The longer the brain is stable, Dr. Jamison went on to say, the longer it stays stable:

"The brain is like a pond. It’s like an ecosystem. You want to get the ideal ecosystem and then you don’t want to disturb it very much. So you don’t want to be messing around with drugs. You don’t want to be messing around with sleep. You don’t want to be messing around with alcohol. You want to really create a stable environment."

Dr. Jamison said the early manias "were absolutely intoxicating states.” “It took me far too long to realize that lost years in relationships cannot be recovered. The damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again and the freedom from the control imposed by medication loses its meaning when the only alternatives are death and insanity.”

“The major problem in treating bipolar illness from a clinical perspective is not that there are no effective medications, because there are. It is, rather, that patients so often refuse to take them. Worse yet, because of lack of information, poor medical advice…or fear of personal or professional reprisals, they do not seek treatment at all.”

“But once you’ve figured that out – the combination of medications, psychotherapy, lifestyle routine, and so forth – then you have a real shot at having a stable life. It’s really very frustrating, because that initial period has a level of difficulty.”

Dr. Jamison takes lithium. For many years, because she was on high doses of lithium, she suffered serious side effects. Standard practice is now lower doses, on which she has fewer side effects now. Her first two rules of her "Rules for the Gracious Acceptance of Lithium into Your Life" are: “1) Clear out the medicine cabinet before guests arrive for dinner or new lovers stay the night. 2) Remember to put lithium back into the cabinet the next day.”

Laugh and Play

A number of years ago, while researching for my email Newsletter, I came across reports of "laughter" groups in Germany and India.

What? I thought. You actually had to teach - or at least encourage - people to laugh? Apparently so. Two years ago, at a national NAMI convention, I encountered a bunch of people who had gathered for a group laugh. There is even an organization that conducts laughter workshops.

Laughter comes wrapped in play. In a recent blog, I noted:

"Play is a vital element in our recovery. So much so, I contend, that if you are not spending at least part of your time acting like a child then getting through adulthood is going to pose a major challenge."

Let me assure you, I have acting like a child down pat. I cultivate a playful spirit, which has not only served me well, but is directly responsible for me not quitting on life. But a playful spirit is not the same as play, as I learned when I first started playing water volleyball two and a bit years ago.

I recall driving home from that first outing with my good friend Paul, who introduced me to the game. "You know," I said, "I haven't felt like this since I was five."

Okay, maybe nine or ten, but five was a very good year for me. Try to recall life at five. If you are having difficulty, you really need to be reading this:

Four or five years ago, Kay Jamison (who needs no introduction) published "Exuberance." The book did not sell nearly as well as her previous books, which is a shame, because what she has to say is vital to our well-being.

In her book, Dr Jamison mentions the disturbing trend toward eliminating recess in schools. Play is critical in the development of kids and young mammals, she says, from ensuring a fully-functioning nervous system to acquiring the intelligence and skills they will later put to use as adults.

When I talked to Dr Jamison about this, she told me that over-regimenting kids’ lives can have enormous consequences for our society.

Kids have the luxury of play under the protection of adults, Dr Jamison explained to me. Later, it becomes their turn to provide that same level of comfort and protection to their offspring. Nevertheless, some adults manage to retain their childlike capacity to respond in wonder to the world around them the rest of their lives, and Dr Jamison's book is full of these examples (such as Teddy Roosevelt).

But these are people who bring a certain lust for life to their work. Work! What about play?

More later ...

Further reading from mcmanweb:

Exuberance

In our phone interview, Dr Jamison stressed that exuberance comes in degrees. The people in her book tend to experience it in supersized dimensions, but even those who are depressed can catch it like a contagion. "Joy infects," she writes. "Expressive individuals strongly influence the moods of those who are unexpressive."

Notwithstanding her observation of exuberance as a temperament, the author cites a 1980 study of hers where 35 bipolar patients reported positive benefits to their illness, including increased sensitivity, sexuality, productivity, creativity, and social outgoingness. Virginia Woolf, who is best remembered for her madness and suicide, tends to be forgotten as the person who lit up London’s Bloomsbury group. Said a colleague: " I always felt on leaving her that I had drunk two excellent glasses of champagne. She was a life-enhancer."

Antipsychiatry: Dumb and Dumber

A few weeks ago, I came across a comment from an antipsychiatry blog referring to Kay Jamison as "lithium-addled." Yesterday, I stumbled on a blog post from someone named Stan, entitled, Kay Jamison, The Unquiet Fraud.

What gives?

First Stan comments on Vincent Van Gogh:

"If he lived today he would be locked away painting blank canvasses to no one ... blinded by antipsychotics ... "

Actually, Stan, for all we know, he might have picked up an Oscar the other night and thanked Pfizer for making it possible. What we do know is that Van Gogh aimed a pistol at his chest and pulled the trigger. He was 37.

But Stan contends, "it was never a life in vain."

Let's defer to Van Gogh, himself, on this: "What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low."

Who knows what choices Van Gogh would make today? Maybe he would choose not to lead a tortured life. Maybe he would choose to stay on meds. Maybe he would choose not to paint. That's the point, he could choose. He would have choices.

I really don't want to pick on Stan, and I would really rather be writing about other things, but this sort of thing is all too typical of the commentary on the blogosphere. The only reason I found this piece was because it came up near the top under a Google Blog search that day.

This is the new democracy of web 2.0. Anyone who takes five minutes to set up a Blogger account can get the same attention as Kay Jamison.

Speaking of Kay Jamison: In the same blog post, Stan takes Dr Jamison to task for ascribing Van Gogh's "precious madness" to the false label of bipolar. Not only that:

"Kay Jamison has been running around for many years publishing one book after another telling us all how wonderful her drugs are in controlling her 'Bipolar Label.'"

Hmm, excuse me if I'm wrong, but ...

Off her lithium, Dr Jamison attempted suicide. On her lithium, she is a professor at Johns Hopkins, co-author of the definitive text on bipolar, best-selling author, recipient of a McArthur genius grant and numerous other awards, plus was in a successful marriage (cut short by the death of her husband).

In short, Dr Jamison exercised a choice that was, sadly, unavailable to Van Gogh.

***

From mcmanweb:

Vincent and Me

There was that little bit of sky pressing down on the fields, as if of a heavier substance than earth, and there were the fields trying to crowd the sky out of the canvas, as if vaster than the heavens. And there were the crows, hedging their bets, represented by stark black flicks. ...

Madly Creative

Says Dr Jamison, in her introduction:

"The fiery aspects of thought and feeling that initially compel the artistic voyage - fierce energy, high mood, and quick intelligence, a sense of the visionary and the grand, a restless and feverish temperament - commonly carry with them the capacity for vastly darker moods, grimmer energies, and, occasionally, bouts of 'madness.'"